LucasArts’ Douglas Crockford reflects on Nintendo content editing

Former project manager at LucasArts Douglas Crockford reflects on a time when …

Nintendo has been criticized, unfairly or not, over the years for being kiddie. Though the company has gradually changed its once-rigid stance over the years (look no further than Godfather and Manhunt on the Wii), there was a time when Nintendo had teams of people checking every game for a catalog of possible restricted content. The "Nintendo seal of approval" didn't come easily back in the day.

The robotic helmet-clad gentleman over at Destructoid found an interesting story from one of the devs behind the cult classic NES title Maniac Mansion, detailing just what kind of restrictions developers were under during the days of proprietary content editing. Douglas Crockford was working as a project manager at the time, and he led the once over-the-top, boundary-pushing game into subversion on the NES. Hoping to illuminate how things used to work behind the scenes for NES developers, he documented the entire "expurgation" process on his web site. Here's a snippet:

The mansion contains a number of arcade video games. One was called KILL THRILL. The name had to be changed. Doug Glen, our Director of Marketing, suggested that we change it to MUFF DIVER, which I thought was a pretty good idea.

Unfortunately, I later became aware of the NES Game Standards Policy, which stated in part: Nintendo will not approve NES cartridges... with sexually suggestive or explicit content.

Yikes, MUFF DIVER had to be changed again. In order to minimize the impact on the artwork, I needed to substitute MUFF with another four letter word that was less suggestive that could make sense with DIVER. We settled on the word TUNA.

Wow, they thought "Tuna Diver" was better? There are quite a few other explicit examples that are surely good for a laugh—the NES SCUMM anecdote, in particular. If nothing else, Crockford's diatribe returns to a time when LucasArts made good adventure games, something we all miss.